King of Birds (ii)

My brother was four-years older, already on the edge of escape: anger and a bullet proof vest his only companions. When he was younger, he thought he was Geronimo and wore a tattered headdress (bought from some roadside souvenir stand) until the feathers fell off, one at a time. Perhaps it was only response but I became an outlaw, Jesse James, a bandanna bandit with heave metal cap guns slung around my waist. The threats of late-night, bare-chested raids were constant and I learned to sleep with my guns beneath my pillow. Even as I outgrew my outlaw days, my brother continued to wear war paint and hunt the beasts that grazed in his mind. The wreckage wrapped itself around our weary lives: we lived in increments, every day an inch, every inch a nail.

Growing up without my father, I often time imagined the places he might have disappeared to. My mother was of little help and I was left to compile clues from her short answers, her silences and her walks to the sea where she would collect shells.

-What happened to him?

She would absentmindedly stroke my hair.

-Some people aren’t meant to be here. It’s as if their very existence is an accident and so the wind corrects their course and takes them back to where they belong.

-Is he still alive?

My mother was draw her cigarette to her lips and smirked through the smoke, the closest thing to a smile she could ever commit to before softening into silence. It was a great disappearing act, which appeared to be our one family talent.

Left to my own devices I concluded that the sea was route he chose. I assumed he ventured forth across the vast ocean seeking some great treasure and that upon discovering it would return home, replete with a chest of shimmering shells, closed like tight fists that held vast riches inside them. I became enamored of books about the sea and the men who boldly drove their ships across it.

The summer of my twelfth year, my brother ran away, although, in truth he could never escape his madness. Who of us can? Some forms of madness are akin to desire, the kind that dangles from the sky
and strikes you like grief, leaving scars in the shape of teeth. My brother traveled by land, wandered through deserts and old Indian battlefields, I’m certain finding only the ghosts of the warriors who had once fought so bravely. Along some desolate stretch of interstate in Wyoming he was picked up by a truck driver and killed when the semi went off the road. It was all shattered glass and ash; only in the wispy smoke of the fire could anyone recognize him. In death there is no glory, just the grim squalor that
all futile gestures leave behind and the battlefield is just a burial ground for broken arrows + dreams. My father had left behind a shipwreck of fools and loss, sadness and shame.

One night, soon after that, my mother was developing photographs in her dark room when she saw my twin, the one she’d lost, emerge from the alkaline. She removed the paper, closed her darkroom, and wept for three days. All these intertwined tragedies were sewn through our family’s life with such thin thread. The spool always unwinds in our hands, yet we act as if it is happening to someone else even when the photographs reveal the terrifying truth.

King of Birds (interlude)

He is the captain of shipwrecks, a brutal youth who
can’t read a map to save his life. He digs for buried
treasure in all the wrong places.

He sails through the staggering hills of the Pacific Ocean
believing that he’s climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and
refuses to set his anchor anywhere but the moon.

“These grim battles must be fought,” he says, “for the
gods of the forsaken, beneath whose mighty promise
our fate will be measured and weighed.”

He raises his tinfoil sword toward the sky, claims this
land for Spain and leads his men into bloody battle
for the love of Helen and her shimmering beauty.

In death there is no glory, just the grim squalor that
all futile gestures leave behind and the battlefield
is just a burial ground for broken arrows + dreams.

As the sun circles the sad blue sky he recognizes
that eventually he must leave the dock and put
away his newspaper sailor’s hat for good.

+ Depression has a way of unraveling even the
most finely crafted dreams and desires +

King of Birds (intro)

My mother only took photographs of sadness. The Crown box camera clicked and fluttered; the wide-eyed shutter collapsed like a hesitant flower with withering petals. The camera looked like a hearse and the images were minor funerals; the death of each moment captured on film. The still photographs were like gravestones that visited only on holidays.

Most nights we sat together on the crumbling front steps of our unfortunate house. My mother smoked a cigarette, while I would stare at the orange ember fuse glow and then, watch for the barrage of dying comets that fell from her eyes like cold failed stars.

[Do stars have teeth?]

It’s all space and distance, light years apart, which only the rarest love can cover. Even I, who had walked on water, could barely cross the distance to reach her. By the time I arrived I’d be exhausted, buried from the burden of crossing; the weight of space and traveling on stars is a soulless experience meant only for gods and ghosts. Yet, my mother had carried me for so many miles just to arrive here and had even lost one of us on the way; my phantom twin acknowledged only in the space between our silences. She carried such strange burdens, which she never shared. She only looked at me with hopelessness and called me her savior. Little did she know that I had laid down my cross years ago and had grown wings instead. What my mother called madness I deemed mercy, the kind that flows between the banks of devotion and doubt.

What Do Your Flowers Say Now?

I was on the edge of the mapped earth, where I rode
the waves of anguish and lash, bandied about the
suffering crush of the water’s cruel intent to drown.

The gulls mad dash, lurch and startle, made the suffering
full of feathers and flight, as if our deepest desires are
held by tenuous traps of wire and want.

How deep, dear Emily, do you suggest digging into
the ocean before breaking off in breaths of tears and
rankled reefs of isolation or idolatry?

You see, adoration has its place among the pricks
and pokes of thorns, but faith is fission of sea and
storm while lying in rags on rocks of rust.

The Biography of Maria Callas

Her mother had episodes of grandiosity and forced Maria to wear expensive dresses that were too big so that she could not go outside and play with the other children. There was never a lemonade stand and rarely were there balloons.

She sang for her lost childhood. She mourned for the birds. After spending so many years walking down dark hallways she sought the light; even as fractured as the light is. How many costumes can one person wear in a lifetime without losing their identity?

[Wounded birds flew from nest to nest seeking comfort]

Maria Callas suffered from myopia, which is why she wore welder’s goggles while sunbathing. She wrapped her neck in towels of warm lemon water. She wrapped her dreams in rags.

From a young age she imagined what love might taste like. She eventually settled on orange. The first time she felt the sting of love prick her soft petals she was overwhelmed by such a sudden sadness of loss that she remained bedridden for three days. Even the birds stopped singing.

When she sang she could feel herself falling back into herself. Only her voice had wings.

Older now and love was an illusion that often visited her on holidays. Alone, ever as ever, she began to design her death. She plucked the tar from her feathers and buried the notes from her final performance in a box with a blue velvet lining. She stepped outside on the balcony of her apartment to feel the heat of the sun on her dying face and she cried beautifully, as only she could do. A butterfly landed on her cheek and drank her tears before it fluttered away.

[Death is a dream. Who cannot live with honor must die with honor]

“Butterfly!”

She curled among her sleeping things and fluttered away.

Ruins (e-minor)

She sleeps with her weary ghosts
too tired to make them believe that
there is a better place for haunting,
a place beyond the immeasurable
sleepy self where dark dreams conspire
to pull them all beneath the surface
where life lingers alone…

…and what of these sad skulls that
lay like ruins among the dust of this
grand illusion named love—she calls
it one of sorrows great mysteries.

The Prophet

The prophet is handing out poems to the dead
hoping to inspire the next great resurrection.
The dead are showing no interest and the poems
lie scattered in the graveyard like torn leaves.

He’s always been known for putting band aids
on broken arms and making lemonade from limes.
The Bible he reads from is full of blank pages and
he’s changed the names to protect the innocent.

As a last resort he built an altar to the art of sorrow
from the stones of his silent heart. Only crows attend
services anymore, putting his words in their beaks
and feeding them to their young.

The paradox of prayer is that it flies on only one wing.

Lament (v.1)

Who, if not you, will recognize the silent unease that plagues my heart? Silence roams the depths of my tortured chamber and haunts it with doubt. I lay stunned by the shock of your absence amidst my desperate cry of distress and am forced to watch the coils of this lament unwind.

[Birds greedily pluck mercy from my cracked lips + hide wisdom in their beaks]

Fate is a dark angel and deaf to our desperation + doubt. Every first day of school, every kiss goodbye, every kite ever flown you can see in the photographs, when his blonde hair would still curl from the sweat; these are no consolation considering the sweet tinctured sea that swallows the soul so greedily, without remorse.

The light of the soul bears wings and flies from the rotted sockets. How many lives have we lived cloaked in darkness? The soul speaks in silence while I speak in a million tongues and yet, none of them are mine. I’ve gone as far as stealing my prayers from the lips of dead prophets and calling them my own. They fly on one wing, never too far before falling back to the earth.

[Question: If time devours all things, as Ovid once declared, does time have teeth?]

The Battle of Little Bighorn

It was the summer of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
My brother and I stood on the last stand hill beneath
the shredded prairie sky. We watched the green
fuses of fireflies swell and burn above the sea of
buffalo grass that had swallowed so many soldiers
leaving nothing but bones, dust and echoes.

Through the smoke of my mother’s cigarette I
could see my brother’s pale-faced sadness reflecting
from the blade of his rattling saber. The smell of
sorrow was rising with the moon; counting the dead
among the broken arrows was futile as the ghosts
were already haunting the books of history.

Who were we to live among the birds which wing
this region? Our feathers hadn’t even come in and
it was nearly time to return home. We lived in the
temper of our blown youth and got lost somewhere
between the hatch and disclose. We forged a
crooked path through a savage garden only to fall.

The front lines and the front yards are where the
battles of boys are fought. The everyday last stands
and shipwrecks among gods or ghosts. In the end,
it’s the fatigue of too many false charges and battle
calls that bury us. Beautiful boys and brothers who
fade from front lawns to become the lost echoes of
summers past and lifetimes ago.

A Question of Why

William Blake is a wretched wick of burnt candle whose light quivers rather than glows. His etchings grind the grains of their subjects into some steel image of permanence. Something he will never be. He is more like the dust he blows from the copper. The word “etch” and the strange corpus he left behind. Engraving nails that spark like stars.

The illuminated ore of Dante.

The shadows mock him; perhaps it is simply the weight of these shadows, created by atmospheric chemistry, that cling like claws to his shackled heart? Dante’s inferno has spiral staircases that lead both up and down and Blake seems to be walking in circles. Neither up nor down, neither heaven nor hell. The curl and the black smoke. When you’ve seen the head of God burst through your window everything else becomes small.

Lost.

Lost souls. (As opposed of those who have either been found or in the process of being found) Who keeps track or collects them? It must be a tedious job.

Wings bent or misshapen, black as crows and foul.
The mechanical kind of levers and pulleys always
need greasing and re-tooling. Broken springs and
stripped screws. The metal shavings are like snow.

Blake wonders; what kind of wrecked feathers do angels have?

Heaven is full of dark woods and unseen strangers; unmarked graves and the musky hulls of those children conceived in death. It is this eternal fuse which burns Blake to shimmering sadness.

(Somewhere below the grate + the glow)

Blake lives in-between the grate of life and the glow of some divine purpose, which is why Wordsworth called him mad; can anyone linger alone in such rarified air and expect to return without a few menacing teeth marks left as scars?

Blake lives in a state of friction + fiction/
of such wretched disbelief + grim squalor that even shame closes its eyes/
while grinning still at the doomed folly + shipwrecked fate of a man who dares
to deem himself both poet + prophet in such reckless times as these/
times of the deaf + the blind/
of angels + bombs/
of times when grief is but an anchor.

[How many vicious sisters can one man have?]

In the end, it is simply a question of why.